The last to come out was a young man dressed in a threadbare suit of tweeds, that somehow hardly seemed American, either in cut or fabric. There might have been a far-away reminiscence of Perthshire moors clinging to them, or earlier memories of a famous creator in Bond Street; but suggestion of the reach-me-down shops from which New York clerks clothe themselves there was none. A flush of anger was fading on their owner’s face as he came out into the sunlight, leaving a mild annoyance that presently gave place to a grin. The firm’s detective, rendered suspicious by a bulging pocket, had just searched him, and had failed to apologize on finding the protuberance to be nothing but a bundle of un-eatable sandwiches that were being taken home to confound the landlady of the young man’s cheap boarding-house. The indignity did not rankle long. It was only a detail in the topsy-turvydom that in one short year had changed a subaltern in a crack English cavalry regiment into an ill-paid drudge in a dry-goods store. Twelve months before Charles Hanbury had been playing polo and riding gymkhana races in Upper India, but extravagance beyond his means had brought swift ruin in its train. Tired of helping him out of scrapes, his connections had refused further assistance; and, leaving the Army, he had come out to "the States" with the idea of roughing it on the Western plains. Still misfortune had dogged his steps. A fall down a hatchway on the voyage out had hopelessly lamed him, and he had been compelled to ward off starvation by obtaining his present inglorious berth. His work—adding up columns of figures entered from the sales-tickets—was quite irresponsible, and he was paid accordingly. He drew eight dollars a week, of which five went to his boarding-house keeper. Limping up —— Street, he turned into the Bowery, intending to take his usual homeward route across the big bridge into Brooklyn. Unable to afford a street-car, he walked to and from the store daily, and it was one of his few amusements to study the cosmopolitan life of the teeming and sordid thoroughfare through which his way led. He was still chuckling over the discomfiture of the tame detective, when his eye was caught by a label in a cheap boot-store. "Three dollars the pair," ran the legend, which drew a rueful sigh from one who had paid—and alas! still owed—as many guineas for a pair of dancing-pumps. "I don’t suppose they’d sell me half a pair, for that’s all it runs to," he muttered, turning regretfully away from the vamped-up frauds, and in so doing jerking the elbow of a passer-by. The victim of his sudden move—a stout, fair man in a light frock-coat and a Panama straw hat—stopped, and seemed inclined to resent the awkwardness. "I really beg your pardon," the culprit said with easy politeness. "I was so absorbed in my reflections that I forgot for the moment that the Bowery requires cautious steering."